I don't think he mean literally half in terms of capacity, like those in the speculation thread who thought there would be physically separate memory buses for games (GDDR5) and the OS (DDR3). I think he's just saying the main memory bus is only half the story when you consider the embedded memory's contribution to the overall design.

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interesting, because i thought nintendo was big into having fast parts in their console even if they weren't the most powerful. kind of harkening back to the n64 and the supposed reason of choosing carts over discs due to load times.

It just means it's DDR3 for graphics board integration (i.e. 1:1 tracing from DRAM to processor) rather than DIMMs. There are PC graphics cards that use DDR3, which would actually be considered "gDDR3", but hey... there's the naming confusion and all.

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interesting, because i though nintendo was big into having fast parts in their console even if they weren't the most powerful. kind of harkening back to the n64 and the supposed reason of choosing carts over discs due to load times.

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interesting, because i though nintendo was big into having fast parts in their console even if they weren't the most powerful. kind of harkening back to the n64 and the supposed reason of choosing carts over discs due to load times.

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery

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interesting, because i thought nintendo was big into having fast parts in their console even if they weren't the most powerful. kind of harkening back to the n64 and the supposed reason of choosing carts over discs due to load times.

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The eDRAM will only be large enough to store the render buffers (frame buffer, some textures, vertex buffers, etc), 99% of the game will be on this slow as hell main memory.
Like many people said already, the difference to whatever Sony and Microsoft put into their new consoles will be brutal.

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First of all, there are 2 separate metrics of interest for memory (well, there are even more, but these are the most important): bandwidth and latency. Both of those impact a huge variety of algorithms and general things a CPU or GPU might do. Generally, bandwidth mostly affects the speed of streaming computations (like those you might find on a GPU or n a CPU using SIMD), while latency mostly affects code that traverses data structures in memory (e.g. lists or trees) -- which is a lot of what any program does. Basically, almost everything is affected to some degree by memory speed.

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Nope. Textures don't require much bandwidth. Regular setups need fast RAM for shit like render targets, but those should be stored in eDRAM on Wii U as far as we know, so I don't think the bandwidth will be an issue. If developers use it correctly that is.

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery

First of all, there are 2 separate metrics of interest for memory (well, there are even more, but these are the most important): bandwidth and latency. Both of those impact a huge variety of algorithms and general things a CPU or GPU might do. Generally, bandwidth mostly affects the speed of streaming computations (like those you might find on a GPU or n a CPU using SIMD), while latency mostly affects code that traverses data structures in memory (e.g. lists or trees) -- which is a lot of what any program does. Basically, almost everything is affected to some degree by memory speed.

Nope. Textures don't require much bandwidth. Regular setups need fast RAM for shit like render targets, but those should be stored in eDRAM on Wii U as far as we know, so I don't think the bandwidth will be an issue. If developers use it correctly that is.